Fau Park`s Start Encouraging

FLORIDA ATLANTIC University`s ambitious plan to create a research and development park on its Boca Raton campus is moving ahead in encouraging fashion.

Based on progress so far, taxpayers will be well served by tax funds provided as seed money for the project. The Palm Beach and Broward county commissions each contributed $50,000 for the park.

Several significant steps have been taken recently to bring the park closer to reality:

(BU) The newly appointed FAU Research and Development Authority, which will run the park, held its first meeting. The authority is made up of FAU President Helen Popovich and six businessmen from Broward and Palm Beach counties; each county commission appointed three members.

(BU) The authority named FAU Dean of Advanced Studies Jeffrey Tennant as acting staff director for the project. Sometime next year a permanent director probably will be hired.

(BU) Tennant presented a tentative timetable which indicates construction could begin as early as the fall of 1986. The most likely site for the park is on 60 acres in the northeast corner of the campus.

It will be a highly unusual research and development park, with one aspect of it unique in Florida: An Innovation Center which will offer many services for starting entrepreneurs. Those entrepreneurs will be establishing new high-tech businesses, and as part of their ``incubation period`` on the campus, they will receive help in finances, business methods, technical advice and such mundane but necessary services as the part-time use of a copying machine.

These new businesses, which are expected to spin off the campus to the real world of competition within two years, will take up about 20 percent of the park. The other 80 percent will consist of more traditional tenants of a research and development park.

Of course there`s no guarantee the park will be successful, but the chances seem excellent. If it succeeds as expected, it will enhance the prestige and academic growth of FAU while adding to this region`s already strong base of high-tech industries.